Letters to Sunday Datebook, Jan. 20

Updated 3:13 am, Sunday, January 20, 2013

In Steven Winn's excellent article ("New spaces for arts," Jan. 6) about new Bay Area arts and culture buildings, I was quoted saying that Stanford's Bing Concert Hall is "an academic building, as opposed to one for outsiders." This is exactly the opposite of what I wanted to say. Yes, the hall is an academic building for students and faculty, but it is also one very intentionally conceived and designed to be used and enjoyed by those outside the university. As a member of the core planning team, I can affirm this was a priority from the very early planning.

We look forward to welcoming the public to an innovative performance space that we believe will add richly to the Bay Area's cultural resources.

Remembering 1968

I have a bad habit of waiting until the last minute to see museum exhibits. Sometimes I miss the deadline completely. Fortunately, the 1968 exhibit at the Oakland Museum was extended three months and I managed to catch it on Nov. 24, the day before it left town.

Man, what a year 1968 was! So many things going on that shook the nation: war protests, women's liberation, civil rights activism, assassinations, changing social mores. The country has never been the same.

One thing that really struck me was in the election section of the exhibit. They had an old-fashioned voting booth with a lever you could actually pull to cast a vote. The choices were several primary candidates: Nixon, Humphrey, Kennedy, Reagan, McCarthy, Wallace, Rockefeller, Cleaver and more.

The election results were shown in the form of a bar chart and most of the candidates, including the eventual winner, Richard Nixon, were in a tie at the bottom of the chart. Robert Kennedy was alone in the stratosphere.

I overhead a few people say "If only Bobby Kennedy had lived." That was interesting: nostalgia for an America that might have been.

Keeper of the radio flame

Thank you for Ben Fong-Torres' Dec. 9 Radio Waves column. For a lot of reasons, I believe I came in the best of times. We were among the last on our block in San Francisco to have TV, but we did have the radio.

A very early program I recall was the one that read the comics on Sunday. Also the mystery shows. Then came the music, and another door opened. Top 10 tunes of the week!

Late-night radio was also very special. It may have been the only place to hear Roger Miller sing "Bobby McGee" or get turned on to Lenny Bruce and his one-of-a-kind talent.

Then for a time we had old 78s on Saturday morning, and the years of FM on top. Plus the happy-talk years. The '60s, '70s and '80s hold a lot of good thoughts for me with the radio.